


Puncture Repair

by feroxargentea



Category: due South
Genre: Canadian Shack, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Permanent Injury, Pining, Post-Canon, dubious plumbing, due South Seekrit Santa Treat, what we talk about when we don't talk about love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-08 21:02:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12872958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: The last thing Ray Kowalski does before he leaves Chicago is to take a long, hot shower.





	Puncture Repair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wagnetic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wagnetic/gifts).



> Written for Wagnetic for due South Seekrit Santa 2017, from the prompts: pining, hurt/comfort, injury, disability, complementary strengths, hair washing (kind of!) and angst with a happy ending.
> 
> Many thanks to cj2017, alcyone301 and alltoseek for beta.

* * *

 

The last thing Ray Kowalski does before he leaves Chicago is to take a long, hot shower. He doesn’t know what sort of plumbing Fraser’s cabin has (that isn’t the kind of detail Fraser would think to mention) but it’s probably a hole in the ground with a plank over it, or maybe a tin bath of rainwater if he’s lucky.

Turning his face from the spray, he braces his arms against the tiles and lets the needles of water pummel his back till it smarts, till he’s half-choked with steam and the skin of his fingertips is starting to wrinkle. It’s bliss, it’s greatness, it’s the highlight of every day—and God knows he doesn’t have a lot of highlights to spare these days.

He can live without it, though. He knows he can. It was a long, long time in the hospital before they’d let him take a shower, and even longer before he could wash his face or scalp. He’s learned the hard way that there are worse things in life than greasy hair.

When every last drop of hot water is gone and the spray turns frigid, he towels himself dry and heads for the bedroom. His plane tickets, bought in a sudden rush of bravado that afternoon, lie waiting on his duffel bag. He isn’t going to think about them now, isn’t going to wonder whether this is the dumbass idea he suspects it is, isn’t going to worry what Fraser will say. He climbs into bed, sets his alarm for crazy o’clock, and falls straight into sleep.

**~o~o~o~**

One of the downsides to snagging last-minute tickets is the redeye check-in time at O’Hare. The other is the layovers. Ray spends hours walking the concourse in Vancouver and more hours kicking his heels in Whitehorse, watching fellow passengers shuffle past him in an endless zombie-like progression. The logical part of his brain knows that just because he’s in Canada now he’s not going to see Fraser appearing round the next corner, but he still finds himself scanning the features of every tall, dark-haired guy that goes by. He hasn’t seen Fraser for eighteen months, doesn’t know how he might have changed. It should be an easy thing to call up an old friend and say, “Hey, send me a photo, will ya?”, but it’s never been like that, not with Fraser. He knows he couldn’t have made it sound that casual.

Halfway through his final flight he wakes suddenly with no idea where he is or what he’s doing, and the woman in the seat next to him flinches back appalled from his glare. She snatches her hand away and he realizes too late that she must have nudged him awake.

“Sorry,” she says. “Oh God, sorry! It’s just, you were making this sort of whimpering noise, so—”

“Shit,” he says. “Sorry, uh, nightmare. I get, you know . . . ”

He trails off, aware that she’s not really listening, not really taking the words in. He sighs and turns back to the window, and he makes sure he keeps his face averted for the rest of the flight.

By the time he boards the Greyhound bus to Petrie Crossing, however, he’s past caring if people stare. When he wakes again a few hours later, he’s so far gone that he’s actually drooling. He jerks upright, wondering whether he’s been leaning on his neighbor’s shoulder. He hopes not. She’s smiling at him placidly enough, regardless. She’s an older lady, looks a bit like his Aunt Esme.

“Long journey?” she says, and proceeds to ask him who he is, where he’s from, where he’s going, and what happened to his face, in such a direct, unfazed way that it almost makes him choke up. No one looks at him like this in Chicago, no one questions him, and he might pretend it’s a kind of acceptance, except that he knows it’s because no one gives a damn. He meets this stranger’s unwavering gaze now and is so pathetically grateful for it that he’d tell her just about anything if she asked: the names of the boys who bullied him in sixth grade; the fact that he has the extra packs of peanuts he filched from the Vancouver to Whitehorse flight stashed away in his duffel bag; the fact that he’s still painfully, hopelessly hung up on someone who left town more than a year ago and isn’t coming back; the fact that he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing here.

He settles for the basics instead. Ex-cop from Chicago, visiting a friend. Work-related gunshot wound, and no, it doesn’t hurt that much anymore. His neighbor clucks comfortingly and asks about his friend, who he is, where he lives.

“Oh, him!” she says. “Well, you’ll be wanting the old Simcoe road, then.” And before he can stop her, she stands up and bellows to the driver in a voice pitched to carry above the Greyhound’s stream of Eighties pop classics, “Hey, Walt! Got a guy here that needs the Simcoe turnoff!”

Ray shrinks down in his seat, but apparently the “Do not speak to driver while vehicle is in motion” sign doesn’t apply to locals, because Walt merely raises a hand in acknowledgement and drives on.

**~o~o~o~**

It’s a thirty-minute hike from the turnoff to the cabin, and Ray knows before he’s halfway down the access track that Fraser won’t be there. It’s a gut feeling, literally: the nervous churning he’s had since he bought the plane tickets has given way to a calm, dull certainty, and he isn’t surprised to find the place shuttered up, the dirt driveway empty. There’s a key on top of the lintel, though, exactly where a trusting person would leave one, so Ray lets himself in, tosses his bag onto the table, and settles down to wait.

Yeah, okay, so he’s never been great at waiting. Five minutes later he’s up on his feet again, examining the room’s few decorations: a landscape calendar tacked to one wall and still flipped to the previous month, a couple of loose antlers propped haphazardly on the mantelpiece above a scattering of pine cones, and a single framed photograph of two fur-clad figures from a bygone age, posing stiffly with a young boy. Fraser and his parents, he supposes, or maybe Fraser’s dad and _his_ parents. It’s hard to tell. Nothing else to look at, unless he counts the small bookcase in the corner or the broken belt and set of leatherworking tools stacked on top. It’s all textbook Fraser (or at least it fits with what Ray knows of him, for what that’s worth), yet the overriding impression is one of emptiness, devoid of being. It’s hard to believe anyone has lived here for over a year and imparted so little personality to the place. Ray feels bad for Fraser, and then feels bad for feeling bad. Maybe Fraser doesn’t have time or money to waste on interior design. Maybe he _prefers_ to live this way. Maybe this _is_ who he is. Ray once thought he knew everything about him, but nowadays he’s not sure he even scratched the surface.

He wanders across to the bookcase and pulls out a handful of the slim red volumes filling its top shelf. He’s skimmed through one or two of them before at Fraser’s request, so he figures it won’t be invading his privacy to read some more. He props himself on the ratty old sofa and opens a journal at random.

An hour later, when he finishes Robert Fraser’s account of how he caught Mickey McAnerney red-handed with the loot at the Mount Cairnes treeline, Ray slams the book shut, scowling. It was a smart case, a good collar, with all the thrills and spills you could reasonably expect from a law enforcement budget of a dollar fifty, and still Ray’s pissed off, because not once in six months did the diary mention the one person he gives a damn about. If Robert ever thought about the kid waiting for him back home, he didn’t bother to say so. Plus, it kind of spoils the story to know how it ends: with him bleeding out into the snow, leaving his neglected, duty-bound son to struggle in his footsteps.

Ray shoves the journals back into the bookcase and straightens up. Okay. Stuff to do, stuff to do. Maybe Fraser likes living like this, but that doesn’t mean Ray can’t make himself useful about the place. He can oil that creaking door, for a start, if he can find some WD-40. Maybe under the sink . . .

By the time he sits down for a supper assembled from Fraser’s canned food stockpile (a pile big enough to wait out the apocalypse and then some), he’s oiled all the doors in the house. He’s also fixed the loose catch on the bedroom shutters, changed the leaky washer in the kitchen tap, and taken the closet door off its hinges, planed its base smooth, and re-hung it so it doesn’t scrape on the floorboards. He’s so hungry he doesn’t care that he’s gotten the cans mixed up, and he gulps alternate spoonfuls of beef stew and creamed rice with undimmed enthusiasm, following it up with his illicit stash of peanuts. He’s eaten weirder combinations (mostly in Fraser’s company, now he thinks about it).

When night falls he’s still alone, so he beds down on the couch, with a cushion as a pillow. It seems kind of dumb when there’s a real bed lying empty in the next room, but it would be even weirder if Fraser came home and found him in it, so—couch. He finds a spare quilt in the closet and wraps himself up head to toe, hugging the cushion close so that its scent envelops him, all plain soap and woodsmoke. Hell, he can be as pathetic as he likes; there’s no one here to judge him. At least he hasn’t actually stolen Fraser’s pillow.

**~o~o~o~**

The next morning Fraser still hasn’t turned up, so Ray calls Directory Assistance and asks to be put through to Petrie Crossing’s RCMP detachment.

“I’m sorry, sir, Corporal Fraser is currently out on patrol,” the chirpy constable on the desk tells him, sounding far too young to be answering phones, never mind maintaining the right. “We’re expecting him back this afternoon, though. Can I take a message?”

“Nah, doesn’t matter, thanks,” Ray says, and hangs up quickly. He knows he should have told Fraser he’s here, should have warned him he was stopping by in the first place, but by now there’s so much stuff he hasn’t told him that he’s scared to open his mouth in case the whole lot comes tumbling out. He’s still hoping that if he can just _see_ him it’ll somehow be okay. They were always okay, one way or another, right up to the point where Fraser left and they were nothing at all.

Ray flexes his hands and looks round the cabin for ways to kill time until the afternoon. The brackets to the water heater’s intake pipe are hanging loose; that’s something he does know how to fix. He pulls on a pair of adapted webbing gloves over fingers already sore from yesterday’s DIY and heads out to the toolshed to fetch a screwdriver.

Reaching to pull the toolbox from its shelf, he notices an axe lying next to the stack of unsplit firewood in the corner and is tempted for a moment to give it a go. Rookie lumberjack sounds way sexier than unemployed cop. The axe-head is heavier than he expects, though, and tricky for someone with limited grip and no depth perception to wield accurately. Over the past few months he’s gotten pretty good at judging distances by ducking his head from side to side, and his remaining fingers have regained much of their function (he can still hear the roars of laughter at his leaving party as Jack Huey listed—with appropriate gestures—all the things ex-Detective Kowalski would still be able to do with his right hand), but even so, it makes more sense to wait for backup. If he’d accepted that a year ago, he’d never have jumped that psycho in the 7-Eleven and lost half his fingers in a futile attempt to protect his face. He props the axe back on the chopping block and takes the toolbox instead.

Mending the water heater’s brackets costs him a dozen new bruises and every swearword he knows. It’s at an awkward height and the screwdriver keeps slipping from his grasp. It’d be easier with power tools, but Fraser doesn’t have any, so Ray ends up duct-taping the pipes to the wall while he leans his whole weight on the handle. By the time he sinks the last screw into place he’s sweating but triumphant. Lateral fucking thinking: maybe he can’t swing an axe or pass firearms training, but he can still bolt a fucking pipe to the fucking wall. Take that, shitty Canadian plumbing!

The outside flue, by contrast, is an easy fix. He can reach into gaps that most people couldn’t, and he clears out a whole mass of pine needles and cobwebs from the cage surrounding the flue, along with an abandoned bird’s nest, broken eggs and all. There’s not much he can do about the clunking noise coming from the water heater itself—that’s probably the pump failing, and he doesn’t have the parts—but at least the damn thing is ventilated now.

He celebrates by having a bath, scrubbing off the dirt and sweat. The tub takes an age to fill and he has to rinse his hair with the tin cup hung there on a nail for the purpose, but hey, it’s indoors, and every trickle of lukewarm water down his scalp feels like a tickertape parade.

**~o~o~o~**

He’s putting the toolbox back in the shed when he hears a noise outside, a rattling growl coming slowly down the access road. He runs out, wiping his hands on his pants, and opens the screen door to go and fetch the eye patch he usually wears in company, but then he spots a truck nosing round the last bend in the road and realizes something’s not right. Something’s not right at all. It’s moving at a zigzag crawl, pulling repeatedly to the left and then overcorrecting, and as he watches it judders to a halt, with its engine still running but no other signs of life.

He leaves the screen door to slam shut and heads for the truck at a jog, trying to see through the glare on its windshield. He yanks the driver door open, and Fraser’s there, looking—God he’s beautiful, he’s stupidly, heartbreakingly beautiful, and of course that isn’t news to Ray, of course it isn’t, but he’d forgotten just how much it throws him off balance.

Fraser, for his part, barely seems to have noticed Ray’s there. He’s hunched over the wheel and doesn’t lift his head from where he’s cradling it in his arms. Diefenbaker jumps over him from the passenger seat and down to the road, where he noses at Ray’s legs, whining.

“Fraser?” Ray says, opening the door wider. “Frase?”

There’s no answer. Fraser doesn’t look up, either at Ray’s voice or when Ray reaches across him to turn the ignition off. He’s conscious and breathing, and he isn’t showing any obvious signs of injury, but he’s not moving.

“Fraser?” Ray repeats, raising his voice and trying not to panic. He jostles Fraser’s shoulder, his heart thumping. “Need some help there, buddy?”

Fraser’s only response is an unintelligible mutter, but he allows Ray to haul him out of the truck and guide him, stumbling blindly, as far as the cabin’s doorstep, where he waits with his arms shielding his face while Ray gets the door open. Ray leads him inside and hesitates by the couch for a moment before taking him through to the bedroom and pushing him to sit on the patchwork quilt.

Fraser just stays there, like a puppet, like a dumb thing, all his willpower gone. His uniform’s intact, so he _can’t_ be hurt, but he’s not reacting to anything and he still has his hands clamped over his eyes as if the daylight’s burning him. Ray stares down at him for a few seconds, snapping his fingers, fighting a rising urge to try and shake him forcibly back into the imperturbable, self-possessed man he remembers from Chicago. Then he sighs.

“Okay,” he says. “Headache, real bad one, right? So I’m gonna, I’m just gonna . . . just stay still for me, okay?”

Stupid thing to say, because Fraser clearly isn’t about to go anywhere. He’s pale and clammy, like he might throw up if he tries to move, but his boots and that heavy woolen coat of his are going to have to come off before Ray lets him lie down.

Ray crosses to the window and closes the curtains before getting a spare blanket from the closet and draping it over the curtain rail, adjusting it so it blocks out as much light as possible. He unfastens the collar of Fraser’s serge, then the belt and strap and buttons, till he can pull the coat off and work the shirt over Fraser’s head. It feels weird to be manhandling him like this—Fraser’s always been a private, reserved man, wary of physical contact—but he’s clearly beyond caring right now. Ray kneels to untie the regulation boots, feeling Fraser’s hands grasp his shoulders as Fraser steadies himself, and in the dimness of the room it’s so close to the standard fantasy that Ray has jerked off to for years now that his cheeks burn hot with shame. At least he’s managed to keep all that from Fraser; at least he can still be here, still do this for him, without him knowing how messed up it is.

He gets the laces undone at last and methodically strips Fraser’s boots and pants, turning away to stack them by the nightstand with unnecessary care. When he coughs and looks back, Fraser has curled up with the bedclothes pulled over his head, so after a few moments of indecision Ray retreats to the living room, closing the door softly behind him.

There’s Tylenol and Advil in his duffel bag, but something tells him this isn’t an Advil-sized problem. That would be like trying to . . . hell, he can’t even think what. Halt a glacier with a toothpick? Stop a blizzard with a Kleenex? Waste of damn time, anyway. He’d had better shit for a while in Chicago, way better shit—the doctors handed drugs out like candy and none of them checked what the others had given him—but it took him months to quit the worst of it and he wasn’t going down that road again. He’d flushed the last few handfuls down the john to make damn sure of that. Now he kind of wishes he’d kept some.

Back in the living room, Dief has stopped whining at the bedroom door and is whining at the front door instead, the wolf-dog equivalent of crossing his legs.

“Call of the wild, huh?” Ray says. “Well, I guess Fraser isn’t going anywhere any time soon.”

He checks again that there’s nothing but silence from the bedroom before putting his jacket on, scrawling a note just in case, and slipping quietly out of the cabin. He and Dief head up the access track for a while, breathing in what he tells himself is good clean northern air, although it mainly feels cold and damp. Dief keeps trying to lead him into the forest, but Ray has no intention of tackling unknown wildernesses on his own, or at least without a companion who can _talk_. Half a mile up the track and half a mile back is more than long enough to leave Fraser, even if he isn’t going anywhere.

On the way home, Dief stops to sniff the trunk of a particularly wide pine. He scratches around in the leaf litter at its base and barks at Ray, sharp and accusatory.

“Yeah, yeah, you got me,” Ray says. “Hey, it wasn’t like I was marking territory or anything. I’d been stuck on a bus for hours! How was I supposed to know Fraser’s place had indoor plumbing?”

Dief sneezes and runs off down the road, leaving Ray to hurry after him.

Back at the cabin, there’s still no sound coming from the bedroom. Ray doesn’t want to disturb Fraser, but he can’t bear not to, even though there’s nothing he can do for him. He forces himself to wait another half-hour first, staring into space and rubbing the beads of his bracelet idly back and forth over the bones of his wrist. Then he gives in and opens the door a crack.

Fraser stirs, turning away with glacial slowness from the doorway’s light. He’s holding his neck stiff, as if his skull is eggshell thin, liable to break open on the pillow.

“Ah. You’re . . . real, then?” he mutters, once he’s safely back under his heap of bedclothes. It isn’t phrased as a question, exactly, but he doesn’t sound too sure about it either.

Ray closes the door behind him and sits gingerly on the bed, trying not to rock it. “Uh, yeah. Thought I wasn’t?”

“Thought . . . maybe . . . migraine symptom.”

He doesn’t say anything else. A sick disappointment starts to lurch in Ray’s chest, but then the corner of the blanket shifts slightly and he feels Fraser’s hand edge towards his. It’s a tentative, uncertain movement, as if Fraser doesn’t really think he’ll encounter solid flesh.

“Yeah, I’m real, I’m real!” Ray says, petting the cloth-covered shape of Fraser’s arm. “See? Real as a real thing. It’s okay, Frase, go back to sleep. I’ll still be real when you wake up.”

**~o~o~o~**

It’s late the next morning when Ray hears the first signs of life from the bedroom. They’re quiet, unassuming noises, just the rustle of bedclothes being drawn back and the pad of bare feet on floorboards, but his whole being is drawn to them like a compass needle to magnetic north. That’s half his world right there, and it’s been _eighteen months_.

He can’t exactly tell Fraser that, though, so he forces himself to stay at the kitchen stove and keep stirring the oatmeal. It’s taking most of his attention not to burn it, anyway. The first batch of gray, lumpy goop he made looked and tasted like wallpaper paste, so he scraped it into the garbage, assuming he’d missed a secret step in the “add water and boil” instructions that Canadians knew about and didn’t bother writing down, but the second batch is looking identical so far, so he figures maybe it’s supposed to be that disgusting. Maybe it’s a masochism thing. Maybe it’s some kind of bizarre national duty. Luckily, not his. He turns the heat down and opens a can of soup for himself instead.

Fraser wanders in some time later, freshly scrubbed and wearing the slightly dazed expression of someone who has just fought his way out of a nightmare and isn’t sure which universe he’s landed in. He doesn’t seem surprised to see Ray, though; he gives him a tentative smile and accepts a bowl of oatmeal with what appears to be genuine enthusiasm. Ray busies himself with the dishwashing and lets him eat half of it in peace, but then he can’t wait any longer. He’s washed his soup plate a dozen times already, and he’s twitching so much he’s going to break it if he doesn’t say something.

“So, the headache all gone?” he asks abruptly.

Fraser looks up. “Mostly, Ray, thank you,” he says, in the polite telephone voice that Ray has come to hate. “All except for a slightly thick head, the sort of thing people tell me resembles a hangover, although admittedly I’m not in a position to verify that.”

Ray snorts. Most of the hangovers he remembers, he’d be on the bathroom floor, slumped against the cold porcelain and covered in his own puke, not sitting bolt upright and enjoying the world’s foulest breakfast cereal, but Fraser’s apparently made of sterner stuff.

“Right,” he says. “So, this town up the road, they got a doctor there or anything?”

“Oh, yes indeed they do!” Fraser says, brightening. “We’re very proud of our community healthcare initiatives here in Petrie. There’s a newly renovated clinic in the civic center, with a physician attending every Thursday and a nurse practitioner three times a week. Patients come from considerable distances to attend it, and there are some very popular support groups, too, and we’re planning to start an antenatal group, and . . . ”

Ray watches Fraser’s hands swirl, encompassing the whole room in expansive gestures as he expounds on the glories of the local healthcare. Ray is used to hearing him across thousands of miles of crackly phone line, his voice tight and contained, repeating the same old reassurances as if filing a status report: “Yes, Ray, everything is quite all right with me.” He’d almost forgotten just how chatty and expressive Fraser can be in person, and how easy it is to get caught up in his fire and enthusiasm. The cabin doesn’t seem bare or empty at all now that he’s in it.

Ray’s not going to let that distract him, though. “This clinic, are you actually registered there?” he says. “As a patient, I mean, not just a cheerleader? Or did you tell them the same bullshit about being okay that you told me? Because that was one monster headache, and I’m guessing it wasn’t your first.”

“Ah,” Fraser says. “Yes, well, they’re migraines, in fact, not just ordinary headaches. Rather unpleasant.”

“So unpleasant that you couldn’t drive?”

Fraser pokes at the remnants in his bowl, pushing them into curves and blobs that he doesn’t eat. He puts his spoon down with a sigh.

“I couldn’t quite see well enough,” he says. “I was experiencing an aura, a complication found in a certain subset of migraine patients, although its symptoms vary. In my case, when the prodrome is at its worst I experience a partial loss of vision—not of eyesight, strictly speaking, since the retinal nerves presumably continue to function normally, but the visual cortex’s interpretation of their output becomes significantly dysfunctional, resulting in a temporary hemianopsia.”

Ray perches on the kitchen table and waits. He knows Fraser will revert to English once he’s gotten the technobabble off his chest.

Fraser takes a deep breath. “I lose half the world. Not half of my entire vision, but the left-hand side of each individual component, as if mirror symmetry no longer makes sense to me. Half of every house is gone, half of every tree blasted as though by lightning, half of the road melted away like a wax doll held too close to the fire. It’s . . . well, it’s terrifying, actually. I thought that if I set off immediately I could make it home before the symptoms became too severe, but . . . ”

“But you didn’t.”

“I suppose not, no.”

“Good thing I was here, huh?”

“A very good thing you were here,” Fraser says, with a warmth that makes Ray’s chest hurt. Glancing away again, Fraser clears his throat and stands up a little unsteadily, holding onto the table until he’s gotten his balance. He wanders over to the window, where he peers out for a minute and then cocks his head, puzzled.

“If you’re looking for your truck, I moved it for you,” Ray says. “Parked it round back. And, Frase?”

“Yes?”

“If you even _think_ about driving in that state again, I’ll . . . I’ll beat you to death with this wooden spoon.” He grabs the oatmeal-covered spatula and brandishes it at Fraser, kind of joking but kind of not. It was a dangerous, _stupid_ thing to have done, and he’s pissed off that Fraser would take a risk like that, as if his life didn’t even _matter_ to anyone. “I’m not even kidding,” he says fiercely. “I’ll do it, and I’ll leave your bruised and battered body outside for the caribou to eat.”

“Hmm. I think you’ll find that caribou are strictly vegetarian, Ray.” Fraser isn’t actually smiling, but his shoulders straighten infinitesimally in that deadpan Canadian laughter that Ray can never stay mad at for long.

“Bears, then,” he says. “Wolverines. Goddamn _ravens_ , till you’re nothing but a pile of weathered broken bones, and then the caribou can come crunch those up too, for the minerals and shit.”

There’s a pause. “You’re going to turn me into a _salt lick,_ Ray? That’s very ecologically considerate of you.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a considerate kinda guy.”

He takes Fraser’s bowl and dumps it in the sink, where the traces of oatmeal stick to it as stubbornly as ever. He’s trying to scrub them loose with the scourer when another thought strikes him, one so horrible he has to stop for a moment to steady his voice. He doesn’t want to put any of this into words, but he has to ask.

“Hey, Fraser, that aura thing’s worn off now, right? So you can see me properly? Both sides of me, I mean, not just . . . ” He waves his hand vaguely in front of his face without turning from the sink. “You get that this is real, right? That it’s permanent?”

For a count of twenty or so there’s silence, and then he feels a touch on his shoulder, Fraser tugging him gently round.

“I do see you, Ray. All of you.” Fraser lifts a tentative hand to Ray’s jaw, as if he thinks Ray might snap at him or flinch away. “These . . . these are skin grafts, yes? And these, here and here,” he traces Ray’s cheek and brow line, “these are—”

“Titanium bridging, yeah,” Ray says. “The doc said she could operate again, try and get ’em more level, but I didn’t see the point, not when . . . ” He tails off, shrugging. The staff at the hospital told him again and again how lucky he was, how close he’d come to death or catastrophic brain injury, but he hadn’t felt lucky, not for a long time.

Fraser’s fingertips skim across Ray’s cheekbones and round each eye socket, testing their asymmetry and lingering at the temples. Ray can’t bear to look up, but he leans a little into the pressure, soft and steady on one side and a weird tingling across the scar tissue and burned nerve endings on the other.

“This sort of work,” Fraser says, “this wasn’t done in a day or a week. Even a month.”

“Nah. Took a while.”

There’s another long pause.

“I would have come,” Fraser says, low and intense. “If you’d told me, I would have come. You do know that.”

“Yeah. That’s why I didn’t.”

Ray can’t tell whether Fraser’s angry at him or just at fate in general, but he can’t be sorry he kept this from him. He can’t be sorry that all his own fury and self-pity and bitterness got flung at strangers instead, and at Stella, who already knew the worst of him. She was the one who loaned him her compact with its mirrored lid when the hospital wouldn’t let him see the damage. Bad as he looks now, he’s glad Fraser wasn’t there for that.

Fraser isn’t looking at the damaged half of his face, though. Fraser is looking straight at him, with the same steady, unblinking gaze he’s had since the day they met, when he threw his life into Ray’s hands before he had the least reason to trust him. Fraser, who’s never really grasped the value of his own beauty, who’s incapable of judging a book by its cover because he’s too busy memorizing every damn word inside, who’s looking at Ray now as if Ray’s the only good thing he’s seen since he left Chicago.

Ray watches Fraser’s gaze drop to his mouth, and he’s suddenly, dizzily sure that that isn’t the look of someone assessing a friend’s injuries; it’s the look of someone who wants very badly to touch, to taste what he’s seeing. Fraser leans closer, his thumbs tracing minute circles at Ray’s temples, and Ray’s pulse is beating so loudly that it takes him a minute to realize Fraser just spoke.

“What?” he asks, dazed.

Fraser’s still looking at Ray’s lips, and he’s so close now that Ray can feel the words dance across his scars like the ghost of a caress.

“I asked if you were staying.”

“Yeah,” Ray says in a rush, before he can second-guess himself. “Yeah. Thought I might.”

Fraser nods slowly, his lower lip blanched and creased where he’s biting at it. “And do you . . . I mean, if I, uh, would you . . . ”

He’s stammering now, flushed, his downcast lashes impossibly long, and Ray almost laughs, because he can’t believe Fraser wants this, can’t believe Fraser thinks he might say no. He twists what’s left of his hands into Fraser’s hair and pulls him closer.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “Yeah, yeah, c’mere . . . ”

And those are the last coherent words he manages for a while.

**~o~o~o~**

Late summer at Fraser’s place is like fall in Chicago, with added mosquitoes and a lot more sex. The onset of winter is like nothing on earth. Ray thought he knew all about cold—hell, it’s not as if Illinois doesn’t do ice and snow and biting winds—but this is something else entirely. It burns at him, eating into his bones and aching through the metal implants that bind his skull together. Cold and pain are things akin to each other, he learns: two sides of a coin, sensations that can be neither truly imagined nor truly remembered once they’re gone. It’s the human mind protecting itself; anyone who could conjure such memories anew would go mad. Ray doesn’t care. The pain zings through him, keeping him alert, keeping him alive.

The darkness gets to him, though. He has the times of sunrise and sunset memorized to the minute, and it feels like a personal insult when the morning twilight loiters for hours under the blanketing clouds, robbing him of half his day. Fraser says there’s no point yelling at the sky, but Fraser doesn’t know everything.

“Feel better?” he asks, when Ray slams back into the cabin after howling defiance at the weather gods.

“Yup,” Ray says cheerfully. “It’ll clear up now. You’ll see.”

He hangs his coat beside Fraser’s and kicks his boots into the corner. Fraser has been working shorter days himself lately, lingering in bed and coming home not long after sundown. “Annualized hours,” he explains. “I’ll have to catch up when summer returns.” He doesn’t ask whether Ray will still be there, but when he smiles at him there’s a gathering hope in his eyes.

He hasn’t had any migraines lately, either.

“That’s because of me, idiot Mountie,” Ray says. “It’s _obviously_ because of me. You missed me so bad your brain kept exploding. Clue much?”

Fraser pretends to consider this, his head tilted. “Many migraine patients do report emotional stress as a significant trigger factor, yes,” he says gravely. “Then again, I was living in a house with a faulty gas flue. Perhaps my headaches were simply down to carbon monoxide poisoning.”

“That was just the pipework, it wasn’t the . . . and besides, it was me that fixed it. Either way”—Ray stabs both forefingers at him—“admit it, you need me.”

Fraser doesn’t admit it, not as such, but he does let Ray grab him by the shoulders and tug him into a wild, stamping dance that spins them once, twice around the kitchen. Diefenbaker retreats under the table, until Ray stumbles against the stove and pulls up, laughing. He extracts a piece of paper from his pocket.

“Check this out,” he says, passing it across.

“Your airline ticket?” Fraser examines it more closely and looks up, worried. “You do know that the return half of this ran out last month?”

“Yeah, I know,” Ray says, grinning wide enough to make his neuralgia twinge. He’s been carefully not checking the ticket’s expiration date for weeks now, just to make sure it had passed when he did check.

“So you . . . ” Fraser says, and stops. He pulls at his ear and clears his throat. “Ray, if you need me to lend—”

“Nah. Got my pension, like I keep telling you. I had just enough saved up to cover a ticket, so I figured there were two options, right? Number one, blow it all on replacement airfares and go home, or B, make a list of all the shit I miss and have it sent up here instead.” He pauses just long enough to let Fraser imagine what he might have ordered. Then he takes pity on him. “I miss hot showers, Frase. That’s all, but I miss ’em like crazy. So, fuck the tickets, fuck Chicago. A new water heater’s arriving next week, and you’re gonna help me install it. Okay?”

“A new—yes, of course,” Fraser says, sitting down abruptly, as if he’s been thumped in the solar plexus. For a minute he sits there, breathing hard and looking shaken. Then he raises his head. “Wait, what, I am?”

Ray feels kind of ashamed for having teased him. There’s no way in hell he’s going to leave, but Fraser’s crazy enough to think he might.

“Hey, it’s okay, Frase,” he says. “You just gotta hold stuff in place while I fix it. I know what I’m doing.”

Fraser’s mouth twitches. “Oh, that I have never doubted.”

There’s a sudden loud rattle from the heater in the corner, and they both stare at it for a while, at its flickering pilot light and the bucket placed strategically underneath to catch the drips from its leaking pipe.

“What make did you buy?” Fraser asks at last.

“A Thompson. It’s a good one. Solid, reputable brand.”

“I see.” Fraser fidgets with his shirtsleeve. “Did it, er, come with any kind of long-term guarantee?”

“Yup, a shiny ten-year warranty.” Ray knows from the way Fraser isn’t meeting his gaze that they’re not just talking about the plumbing anymore, not really. “Don’t worry, it’s built to last. With a bit of luck it should go twenty-plus. That sound like a plan to you?”

Fraser nods thoughtfully, his face breaking into a smile. “It does, actually. It sounds perfect. Twenty years, and then . . . ?”

Ray laughs and leans down to kiss him, slow and sweet. Twenty years of this, he thinks. Yeah. Sounds like a plan.

“Then I guess we save up for the next,” he says.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I leaned on you today.  
> I regularly hurt but never say.  
> I nearly wore the window through—  
> Where was Air-Sea Rescue?  
> The cavalry, with tea and sympathy?  
> You were there,  
> Puncture repair.  
> I leaned on you today. 
> 
> Elbow – Puncture Repair.
> 
>  **Safety note** : Please have all your gas appliances fitted and serviced by a competent professional and consider buying a carbon monoxide alarm. Thank you kindly.


End file.
